So my 500GB DVR Expander is experiencing the issues others here have reported with freezing and reboots. I need a replacement but really don't a lot of space just something more than what the TiVo HD offers. Was curious what might be the cheapest route to go.

So my 500GB DVR Expander is experiencing the issues others here have reported with freezing and reboots. I need a replacement but really don't a lot of space just something more than what the TiVo HD offers. Was curious what might be the cheapest route to go.

No brainer. 1TB drives are $50. 2 TB drives are $70. These would be internal drives, and you have to do the work, but don't think there is anything cheaper. Certainly not on a price per GB basis.

Be aware that you can buy preconfigured 2 TB drives for the original S3 from weaknees and/or dvrdude, and possibly others.

Some more competitively priced than others, so do your homework.

Since the least expensive pre-configured 2TB drive is more than twice the cost of a bare drive, if I were you I would take other factors into consideration.

If your TiVo 3 is not on lifetime, you might consider replacing it with a THD.

If it is on lifetime and the recordings you wish to keep for an extended period are not copy protected, consider getting a large drive for your computer and offloading the content. When the TiVo internal drive starts to die, replace it with another 1TB drive.

If it is on lifetime and recordings are copy protected, bear in mind that you will loose all of your settings, SPs, and recordings if you install a pre-configured drive.

This quote is from a response to an OP that has a TiVoHD; Does this also apply to a TiVo S3? ....Fingers crossed.
Prices are down and I'm three years on my current Seagate 1TB upgrade.....Just looking to the near future.

Thanks,

As lpwcomp mentions, the jmfs program will not work for upgrading the original Series3. However another member claims that he was able to upgrade his original Series3 to 2TB's. More here:

Looking over the FAQ, only seen Windows instructions. I have only Macs. Any way to do this with Mac? If not whats my next cheapest option?

Since neither MFSLive nor JMFSLive are Windows programs, at best you can say that all you've seen is PC instructions. Both have worked on Macs.

When upgrading a TiVo HD, the only thing you have to do using WinMFS is Supersize. A non-supersized drive will work just fine, you will just not have quite as much space for user recordings.

The main problem with an Apple computer is that it is difficult to impossible to connect your own drive to a SATA port and some of the things you need to do to some drives e.g. wdidle3, possibly hdparm, can't be done on a drive connected via USB.

I went ahead and bought 1.5TB WD15EARS drives locally. I burned the jmfs iso to a thumb drive and booted from it and used the tools to copy my original 160GB drive and then expand it. Dropped to the shell and fixed the acoustic value. Drive is dead silent. I wasn't even sure it was working.

Rebooted and used WinMFS to Supersize the drive. Tried the drive and it wouldn't soft-reboot, so used wdidle3 to fix it. Thought I wouldn't have to do that since the drive was manufactured in March 2011, but there it is.

System Info shows 237 HD hours, 2072 SD hours.

Would it be nice to have another half a gig for $10? Sure. However, I can't even imagine using up the space that's here at this point. I churn through recordings at a pretty good pace. Mostly, I wanted to convert everything to HD and now I can and then some.

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, there is a very peculiar side effect: I can't seem to use Select-Play-Select-Pause-Select to make the time bar go away faster. Everything else seems fine. Any ideas?

Did your original hard drive already have the latest software version and complete guide data?
I just finished an upgrade to 2TB with an original drive that only had one week of guide data and after the upgrade I noticed that the Season Pass option was missing when I selected a show to record. Once my Tivo updated the guide data, the Season Pass option returned.

So the advice I have is to give your Tivo a couple of days to get itself organized before you start 'customizing' it.

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I created a truncated backup with WinMFS and restored it to a Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB ST1500DL003.

On the first restore, I answered the question about the 1TB partition sizes the wrong way and it allocated the entire drive (230 some hours). Tivo rebooted itself about an hour later and then started freezing. I ran the kickstart 54 & 57 diagnostics and nothing turned up.

I did the restore again with the 1TB partition size. It boots up and looks normal, but it locked up after 2 hours.

Any ideas on what to do from here?
- Full copy from original drive
- Do a guided setup on the new drive
- Give up on Seagate drive and get WD (I'm using a laptop with USB-Sata dock, so I avoided the WDs since I couldn't run the utility)

I created a truncated backup with WinMFS and restored it to a Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB ST1500DL003.

On the first restore, I answered the question about the 1TB partition sizes the wrong way and it allocated the entire drive (230 some hours). Tivo rebooted itself about an hour later and then started freezing. I ran the kickstart 54 & 57 diagnostics and nothing turned up.

I did the restore again with the 1TB partition size. It boots up and looks normal, but it locked up after 2 hours.

Any ideas on what to do from here?
- Full copy from original drive
- Do a guided setup on the new drive
- Give up on Seagate drive and get WD (I'm using a laptop with USB-Sata dock, so I avoided the WDs since I couldn't run the utility)

If this is really a THD, model 65xxxx, use JMFS to redo the upgrade from the original drive. You can use the entire 1.5GB. Just use WinMFS to supersize it.

Did your original hard drive already have the latest software version and complete guide data?
I just finished an upgrade to 2TB with an original drive that only had one week of guide data and after the upgrade I noticed that the Season Pass option was missing when I selected a show to record. Once my Tivo updated the guide data, the Season Pass option returned.

So the advice I have is to give your Tivo a couple of days to get itself organized before you start 'customizing' it.

That's why the very first line of instructions in the jmfs TiVo HD upgrade guide says "Use an original 160GB Tivo HD Drive - if it doesn't have the latest software, install it back into your Tivo HD and force it to upgrade to the latest version..." NEVER skip steps!

I created a truncated backup with WinMFS and restored it to a Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB ST1500DL003.

On the first restore, I answered the question about the 1TB partition sizes the wrong way and it allocated the entire drive (230 some hours). Tivo rebooted itself about an hour later and then started freezing. I ran the kickstart 54 & 57 diagnostics and nothing turned up.

I did the restore again with the 1TB partition size. It boots up and looks normal, but it locked up after 2 hours.

Any ideas on what to do from here?
- Full copy from original drive
- Do a guided setup on the new drive
- Give up on Seagate drive and get WD (I'm using a laptop with USB-Sata dock, so I avoided the WDs since I couldn't run the utility)

Did you run a drive diagnostic on your new Seagate drive? You could try running Kickstart 54 which is a SMART diagnostic. It's predictive but if it finds problems it will generally let you know...

Seagate drives used to have very high QC but since purchasing Maxtor they have slipped to the bottom of the pack. The 1.5TB drives required some odd firmware update a while back...not sure if that's still the case or not. Overall they're particularly problematic (really poor customer ratings everywhere) and that's why they are never recommended for TiVo upgrades.

My advice would be to pick up a 2TB WD GP or Hitatchi CoolSpin drive and start my scratch using jmfs:

If you're not up for that I'd run some diagnostics on the Seagate drive, even if KS54 comes back clean. Use Seagate Tools's extended diagnostics and see what comes back.

FWIW KS57 and KS58, TiVo's built-in diagnostic and repair tools are only capable of so much. If there's a major problem that they can't fix the programs will run quickly and just reboot TiVo...there's no messages and no way to know if they found something or not.

Hope that helps...probably not what you wanted to hear, but best of luck and let us know how it goes!

I went ahead and bought 1.5TB WD15EARS drives locally. I burned the jmfs iso to a thumb drive and booted from it and used the tools to copy my original 160GB drive and then expand it. Dropped to the shell and fixed the acoustic value. Drive is dead silent. I wasn't even sure it was working.

Rebooted and used WinMFS to Supersize the drive. Tried the drive and it wouldn't soft-reboot, so used wdidle3 to fix it. Thought I wouldn't have to do that since the drive was manufactured in March 2011, but there it is.

System Info shows 237 HD hours, 2072 SD hours.

Would it be nice to have another half a gig for $10? Sure. However, I can't even imagine using up the space that's here at this point. I churn through recordings at a pretty good pace. Mostly, I wanted to convert everything to HD and now I can and then some.

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, there is a very peculiar side effect: I can't seem to use Select-Play-Select-Pause-Select to make the time bar go away faster. Everything else seems fine. Any ideas?

Excellent to hear that things worked out okay. I never used the 30 skip hack but IIRC it went away at some point...could be wrong about that though. Hopefully someone else will chime in.

Looking over the FAQ, only seen Windows instructions. I have only Macs. Any way to do this with Mac? If not whats my next cheapest option?

You can upgrade your TiVo HD using a Mac. There are a couple of challenges however.

1. If you want to upgrade using one of the recommended Western Digital GP hard drives you will probably have to run a program, wdidle3.exe, to adjust the timeout on the Intellipark feature to avoid initial and/or soft reboot problems. That has to be run on a PC with the drive connected directly to a SATA port.

2. If you want to get the additional recording space called "Supersizing" it requires that you run winMFS which is a Windows based application.

3. If you want to upgrade using one of the recommended Western Digital GP hard drives that was not designed for A/V use (the WD20EARS for example) and want to adjust the AAM (auto acoustic management) from the default 254 to the quietest setting, 128, that probably has to be done on a PC. (I say "probably" because I've tried the hdparm command line to adjust the AAM with the jmfs program on a Mac and although it should work for some reason it doesn't. It does work on a PC however.)

So as you can see there are some speed bumps to deal with if you want to upgrade a TiVo with a Mac. The ideal way is with a PC with at least two open SATA ports on the motherboard though. I keep an old Dell around just for that.

All of that said you can upgrade your TiVo HD with your Mac. Since the recommended Western Digital drives present some challenges I would go with one of the new Hitachi CoolSpin hard drives. Although it doesn't have a long track record yet, others here are using it to upgrade their TiVo's successfully.

Create a disk or USB drive image from the ISO and boot into it. Insert the disk or thumb drive, hold down the Option key when booting up until you're given the choice of drive to use. (Oddly enough the jmfs disk appears as "windows" even though it's a Linux program).

If you have something other than a Mac Pro (where you have access to the SATA ports on the motherboard) you'll need to connect your original TiVo drive and your new hard drive via a dock or SATA/USB adapter. I prefer docks...I have two...

Note that a dual-drive dock will NOT work, each drive has to have it's own dedicated connection.

If you wanted to “Supersize” (which requires running winMFS, a Windows based program) you could install Parallels or VMWare Fusion and a copy of Windows.

So again, using a PC is the way to optimize all of your choices, but it can be done on a Mac. Perhaps you can bribe someone with a PC?

Of course the other option as dwit wisely points out is to purchase a pre-imaged hard drive from a third party like Weaknees/DVRUpgrade (same company now) or DVRDude on ebay has them available now and then.

As for the 30 sec skip, it is alive and well. Totally stable. Don't know how I could manage without. Isn't it a standard feature on the Premiere?

Oh, duh, you're right. It's the time bar he's referring to. No idea about that either. Yes, the skip is alive and well in the Premiere. I never got used to that though...I can usually 3x FF and get past the commercials faster.

Why is it necessary to make sure you have the most recent software before using jmfs? When (ok IF) tivo updates the software will there be an issue with drives expanded with jmfs?

Will jmfs work with winMFS created backups?

Search might answer my questions but I have no way of knowing if older information is accurate.

We used to be able to use an old image, from an original drive stored in a box or on our PC, to prep a new drive. Let tivo update the drive to the current version. I know the B. hybrid image worked after several updates.

Why is it necessary to make sure you have the most recent software before using jmfs? When (ok IF) tivo updates the software will there be an issue with drives expanded with jmfs?

I don't know the specifics (I can guess but it'd only be a WAG - Comer could tell you), but I do know those that have tried updating using their original TiVo hard drives without updating have run into problems. Comer was very clear that the OEM drive needed to be running the latest version for jmfs to work.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lew

Will jmfs work with winMFS created backups?

It seems like it would be possible if you restored a truncated backup to a new drive (the new drive being smaller than the final upgrade drive as it needs to be expanded), updated to the latest version and then ran jmfs. That said I don't know of anyone that's tried it.

I don't know the specifics (I can guess but it'd only be a WAG - Comer could tell you), but I do know those that have tried updating using their original TiVo hard drives without updating have run into problems. Comer was very clear that the OEM drive needed to be running the latest version for jmfs to work.

It seems like it would be possible if you restored a truncated backup to a new drive (the new drive being smaller than the final upgrade drive as it needs to be expanded), updated to the latest version and then ran jmfs. That said I don't know of anyone that's tried it.

OK I did a quick search. I think you have to be using at least whatever software version (not sure of the number) which allowed the use of the 1T external DVR Expander. That makes sense. I was concerned that a 2T updated tivo wouldn't be able to handle any software update.

That's why the very first line of instructions in the jmfs TiVo HD upgrade guide says "Use an original 160GB Tivo HD Drive - if it doesn't have the latest software, install it back into your Tivo HD and force it to upgrade to the latest version..." NEVER skip steps!

Does this mean I can not use a 1GB drive that was created with instantcake? My original dirive was killed by the external drive fiasco.

That's why the very first line of instructions in the jmfs TiVo HD upgrade guide says "Use an original 160GB Tivo HD Drive - if it doesn't have the latest software, install it back into your Tivo HD and force it to upgrade to the latest version..." NEVER skip steps!

Yep, I noticed that. That's why I had asked Gowan if he had done that.

For the upgrade that I did, I installed the original drive Saturday a week ago. I forgot that I did a C&D before I originally pulled it, so I had to do guided setup when I re-installed it. I forced the calls to get the guide data and software update, and then let the Tivo run ~28 hours.
After that, I swapped drives again so I could finish watching the shows I couldn't transfer.
I did the upgrade just last weekend (almost a week later) so I knew I was going to be short a week on guide data.

After the fact, I did wonder if that 1st step was really necessary since the Tivo is pretty good at updating itself.

__________________The Man Prayer: I'm a man ...... I can change ...... If I have to ...... I guess.

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